VirtualWisdom 6.3 enhances infrastructure capacity planning to deepen visibility, simplify capacity management, control costs

Virtana introduced latest version of VirtualWisdom, its hybrid IT infrastructure management and AIOps platform for mission-critical workloads. VirtualWisdom 6.3 is the initial product launch since Virtana’s rebrand in October, and continues the company’s push into capacity management with global storage array analytics, an expanded range of integrations, and new portable reports and dashboards.

Mission-critical hybrid applications combine resources in public clouds, with physical or virtual resources residing in private data centers. For these crucially important workloads, operating at web-scale, managing cost, performance, and capacity has never been more complex or important. 

To gain the insights and operational control that deliver efficient, cost-effective operation, organizations need real-time visibility, automated discovery, AI-powered analytics, and immediate access to best-practice solutions that proactively solve infrastructure-related performance and capacity issues for critical applications.

The VirtualWisdom release features the new Capacity Auditor, a global storage array analytic that offers a unique approach to global capacity management designed to provide app-centric insights and intelligence across hybrid infrastructure and multi-vendor data storage environments. With Capacity Auditor, organizations have a broad view of storage usage and trends across all storage arrays, applications, locations, physical storage assets, and effective capacity.

The VirtualWisdom 6.3 release includes support for Oracle’s Solaris, Red Hat KVM, and Pure Storage solutions that provide all the power of the VirtualWisdom platform to applications using infrastructure within these environments, and management of infrastructure elements that live within them. It also enhances VirtualWisdom’s continuous real-time infrastructure discovery with simple, intuitive dashboards and reports for servers, storage, and networks. Enabling immediate insights into critical relationships between infrastructure elements, visibility into vital statistics, and the capability to automatically apply customizable information sets for identification and cost.

The offering empowers users to share collective insights, dashboards and reports across the VirtualWisdom community. Customers and partners can easily exchange best-practice monitoring reports and visualizations unique to specific environments and applications. Its hybrid, real-time application views make it easy to visualize hybrid applications that cross multiple technology boundaries in one view – including applications that span multiple clouds (AWS, Azure), virtual environments (VMware, KVM, HyperV, PowerVM) as well as physical systems.

VirtualWisdom provides real-time, data-driven lifecycle recommendations to assure performance, speed problem resolution, automate workload optimization, free-up capacity, and ensure resource availability. AI-powered capacity forecasting helps organizations avoid capacity-driven problems before they can happen, and AI-powered workload optimization keeps applications operating within SLAs.

“To provide organizations with a competitive advantage, IT needs to use and manage their resources efficiently. IT professionals need tools to enable them to quickly resolve problems, even as the infrastructure becomes increasingly more complex. They also need to automate as many of the mundane IT tasks as possible,” said George Crump, President and Founder of Storage Switzerland. “Powered by AI/ML capabilities, VirtualWisdom offers recommendations and automated problem resolution, providing customers with deep infrastructure visibility.”

“The Virtana VirtualWisdom platform has been a fundamental enabler of our mission-critical manufacturing technology solutions and services for many years now,” said Todd Weeks, Plex Systems Global VP of Cloud Operations. “Our ability to offer our customers nearly 100% business continuity in a highly efficient cloud infrastructure relies on the real-time infrastructure visibility and AI-powered analytics that are unique to the VirtualWisdom platform.”

“Digital transformation is driving exponential data growth as today’s enterprises must have global visibility into all storage resources to continuously meet these ever-growing demands. Point solutions to managing data sets across multiple vendor storage environments result in highly fragmented, manual and wasteful practices and resources – and can put entire applications at risk,” said Tim Van Ash, SVP of Products at Virtana. “With application aware, predictive insight into the underlying digital infrastructure, VirtualWisdom offers the industry’s first and only global infrastructure capacity auditor and forecaster that can providing real-time visibility into mission-critical digital workload infrastructure.”

New HPE GreenLake Central delivers cloud experience everywhere with next-generation as-a-Service platform

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will now deliver its entire edge-to-cloud portfolio as-a-Service, with the launch of HPE GreenLake Central, an advanced software platform that provides customers with a consistent cloud experience for all their applications and data, through an operational console that runs, manages and optimizes their entire hybrid IT estate. HPE unveiled HPE GreenLake Central in a keynote address by Antonio Neri, President and CEO, at HPE Discover More Munich.

Building on the momentum of HPE GreenLake, HPE’s IT as-a-Service offering, HPE GreenLake Central gives customers a simple, unified, digital experience across public and private clouds, the data center and edge workloads. This platform accelerates business outcomes for customers by lowering costs and risks and providing greater choice and control.

Despite the promise of the cloud to speed delivery of new applications, organizations’ digital transformation efforts have become more complex, costly, and slow-moving. 

To add to these challenges, the vast majority of applications and data remain in the data center, and are growing exponentially at the edge. As a result, organizations have been dealing with a siloed, inconsistent experience across their hybrid estate, and lack control and visibility into the costs and risks across their enterprise.

HPE GreenLake Central allows customers to break through these challenges by delivering a single, integrated management control plane for their entire hybrid IT estate, and one operational console from which to direct and drive their digital transformation initiatives – all delivered as-a-Service. The platform gives customers the freedom to choose which tools they want to use to build applications, where and how to place their workloads and data, and only pay for what they consume.

HPE GreenLake Central helps CIOs regain control of their organization’s hybrid IT estate through a unified dashboard and operational console that positions them as service brokers to the rest of the business. CIOs can monitor and take action on a range of KPIs, including security, capacity, cost, compliance, and resource utilization. 

HPE GreenLake Central brings the self-service experience to the on-premises environment, and gives CIOs unmatched visibility and control, so they can focus on innovation and strategy, and transition from reacting to running hybrid IT.

It enables developers to gain access to a simple “point, click, get” pay-per-use platform that allows developers to write, release, and deploy code quickly, without having to worry about underlying infrastructure. Developers can access a wide array of tools and services from HPE and partners through a marketplace, giving them one “workbench” from which to design and create applications at high speed.

It allows CFO to obtain a real-time view of technology spend across the hybrid IT estate, to understand spend by users, teams, and business units, and within public and private cloud, data center and edge environments. HPE GreenLake Central provides finance with visibility to control costs and ensure projects remain on budget.

It also delivers legal, compliance and security capability to gain a single, integrated view into the governance and security status of an organization’s hybrid IT estate. Users can identify risks through a KPI dashboard and take action by leveraging over 1,000 controls to ensure compliance with company and industry regulations. Risks and failures are easy to identify and address, and comprehensive reports offer significant reduction in the time it takes to perform audits.

“HPE GreenLake Central is a transformative platform that changes the game in hybrid IT,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO, HPE. “With this offering, every user in a company gains access to a unique console from which to run their organization and achieve powerful business outcomes. Now the CIO can operate as a strategic service broker, and everyone benefits from a consistent cloud experience, resulting in lower costs and risks, and greater choice, control, simplicity, and speed.”

HPE GreenLake is one of the quick growing businesses in HPE, with more than 740 customers worldwide, including 160 new customer logo wins this year. Additionally, HPE has enabled its global partner community to deliver the offering – in 2019 the channel generated over 200 percent order growth for HPE GreenLake.

HPE GreenLake Central is in trial with customers now, and will be generally available to HPE GreenLake clients by the end of HPE first quarter next year. 

Pulse Secure releases Secure Access solution to achieve Zero Trust Security for hybrid IT environments

Pulse Secure announced Tuesday that it has introduced new Secure Access management and threat mitigation capabilities within its Zero Trust Network Access platform. Through these enhancements, Pulse Secure enables enterprise and service provider organizations to progress Zero Trust security and mitigate hybrid IT risks while simplifying access to multi-cloud and data center resources.

Pulse Secure’s Zero Trust Network Access platform allows organizations to centrally manage policy and automate secure access to applications, data and services that are delivered on-premise or in private and public cloud environments. 

The company continues to incorporate open standards and proprietary means to extend platform interoperability and automation that provide customers greater operational oversight, policy management and threat response economies.

Pulse delivers end-to-end Zero Trust visibility, protection and availability for hybrid IT environments. The solution portfolio enables simple, efficient access to enterprise applications and resources in cloud and non-cloud environments - without compromising security or productivity. 

It also offers extensive user and device authentication and authorization; Zero Trust unified policy and compliance; simple, integrated user experience from the device of choice; single-pane-of-glass secure access management and operational visibility across on-premises and cloud; and flexible, scalable and reliable.

Virtual Instruments becomes Virtana; allows users to harness real-time infrastructure analytics to transform IT operations

Virtual Instruments announced on Monday that it has become Virtana, a company focused on providing customers with AI-powered hybrid IT infrastructure management platforms for mission-critical workloads. 

Underscoring this commitment to helping enterprises manage their complex multi-cloud environments, Virtana introduced CloudWisdom, a SaaS-based cloud cost optimization and monitoring platform. CloudWisdom helps customers plan, analyze and optimize their cloud workloads, services and resources. Along with the new name, the company has advanced its business model to include self-service SaaS and downloadable trial versions of its solutions.

Virtana has re-invented hybrid IT infrastructure management around a core understanding of applications and their relationship to the infrastructure – from the data center to the public cloud. 

Virtana’s VirtualWisdom, WorkloadWisdom and new CloudWisdom platforms form the foundation of next generation hybrid infrastructure management. Virtana platforms enable accelerated problem resolution; efficient management of capacity and cost; and intelligent automated workload placement.